Henry writes: > I've read that HP is port JAVA to the HP3000. Yes. I believe it will be distributed initially as freeware available via the net (from the JAZZ web server at HP most likely). There is an Alpha version of it currently available for early-adopter types. There is a separate Interex sponsored mailing list (SIGJAVA-L) for people who are interested in the general topic of Java on HP computer systems, especially the HP3000. > I'm expecting and hoping the use of JAVA will enable me to access all of > my HP data files (KSAM, Turbo Image, and Flat Files) from PCs connected > to my internal network. Yes this would be a very cool thing. There are two ways for this to work. You can either have a server program on the HP3000 do the access for you and then return the data to the client (this could make use of the new HP port of Java to the 3000 which you could use to write the server in), or you can do the access from the client, probably through the JDBC to ODBC bridge software. This would require that you have an ODBC driver on the client which can get to your data, but it would not require Java on the 3000 server at all. > I know there is an ODBC driver for Image/SQL but I haven't heard of a > driver for KSAM or the Flat Files on the HP3000 or a direct ODBC to > Turbo Image data bases. Does anyone know of any other ODBC drivers? HP has announced that they will be distributing a version of MB Foster's ODBC product as a replacement for their own ODBC driver. I believe that MB Foster have a more advanced version that supports access not only to Image, but also to KSAM and flat files. You could use this product today along with the JDBC software and Java to write complete applications on a PC that access all your data on the 3000. Note that in this scenario there is no Java code running on the 3000, and no need for it either. Symantec have announced a new product called dbANYWHERE, which is a JDBC gateway that runs on a PC, and allows Java applets and applications to use the JDBC API to talk to remote databases without having to install any ODBC or database drivers on the client. The JDBC requests are forwarded on to the dbANYWHERE server PC which performs the actual ODBC (or native RDBMS) access calls and then returns the data to the client. This is a pretty slick solution, though it still has the security problems of any client-side database access architecture. There is a free demo of dbANYWHERE available at http://cafe.symantec.com/ So tools for using Java to access data on the 3000 in a client server application are all there *today*. The work that HP is doing to port Java itself to the 3000 will allow you to do a few more things, among them: *) Writing the "server" part of your client/server application in Java *on* the 3000, which would enable you to use things like Java RMI for remote objects and other cool thing like that. It's also the best way to ensure that the security of your system is sufficient. *) Writing complete HP3000 applications on the HP3000. This could either be part of a larger multi-platform distributed application taking advantage of the Java language's cross-platform nature, or it could even be simple standalone HP3000 applications which are written in Java just because it is a better language to program in than the other alternatives available. Before Java *on* the 3000 will really be useful, libraries of Java "Native Methods" will need to be written to allow direct access to Image, KSAM, the File System Intrinsics, and whatever else people need. It should be possible for anyone with the HP3000 version of the JDK to write their own such routines, but I'm hoping that HP or the user community will be able to provide a standard set of HP3000 Java API extensions that everyone can use. I'd be working on the Image interface libraries myself right now if I had any free time at all. Anyone interested in working on such a project is invited to join the Interex SIGJAVA-L list. G.